The popularity of the Internet has resulted in an ever-increasing amount of content that is available to individuals. For example, many individuals share content with each other via social networking services or social media. In particular, via social networking services, individuals can build social networks with people who share similar personal interests, career interests, activities, backgrounds and/or real-life connections. Then, an individual can share content, such as ideas, pictures, posts, activities, events, interests and/or video, with people in their social network using a social networking service.
However, there are often challenges associated with existing social networking services. In particular, an individual may have relationships with people who have different backgrounds or interests, and thus who may be members of different, partially overlapping social networks. It can be difficult for an individual to manage the distribution of content to specific people in these social networks.
Moreover, there can be a conflict of interest inherent to social networking services between individual privacy and the use of information about the users of social networking services and their content. Notably, while many social networking services are ostensibly free, user information and content are usually directly or indirectly used to monetize the social networking services. For example, user information and content may be sold to third parties. Alternatively or additionally, user information and content may be used to guide the display of targeted advertisements to the users at the expense of user privacy.
Furthermore, content posted on social networking services is long-lived. Invariably, while many people subsequently regret something that they said or did that is readily available within their social network(s) via a social networking service, it can be difficult for them to delete or erase this information. In addition, even though content may have a finite lifespan, outdated content is often still accessible on social networking services.
In principle, some of these challenges can be addressed by automatically deleting content a short, fixed time after it is posted in a social networking service. However, in practice this approach is inflexible and can be misleading, because it is typically not possible to delete all the copies of the content on the social networking service or on different servers on the Internet.
Consequently, existing social networking services can be frustrating for users, which can degrade the user experience.